Canon BJC-6500
Price: AU$699
Distributor: Canon Australia
Ph: 02 9805 2000; Fax: 02 9888 3650
www.canon.com.au
Only two of the printers we received were capable of producing A3 output and the Canon BJC-6500 was the first of them. The printer is rated at 1440 x 720dpi and at $699 is reasonably priced, given its features. The printer's styling is typical of Canon's current BubbleJet range and includes an internal AC adaptor and both parallel and USB ports. The top of the printer features a status LED, power, and form feed buttons and, in addition to a paper thickness lever for the print heads, to cater for envelopes, the paper feed mechanism can also be adjusted for various paper thicknesses.
The documentation is identical to all the other Canon printers reviewed except the 2100SP which features a more detailed manual. That is not to say the documentation is not goodâ€"they are excellent with three large -Getting Started" sheets for the various PC Parallel/USB combinations and USB with the Mac. The User's Guide is easy to read, the layout is clear and certainly covers operations in enough detail for the average user.
Lifting the front cover while powered up moves the printheads out for cartridge replacement. The 6500 features dual printheads, the leftmost can be configured with a black printhead and cartridge for day-to-day printing in conjunction with the CMY colour print head at the right. Alternatively a photo print head and cartridge can be fitted in this location and along with the standard provides six print colours; black, photo cyan, photo magenta, and, in the standard cartridge, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Printheads can be replaced independently which is great because the print heads can typically last several cartridge refills before failing, thus saving money.
Also, each colour has its own cartridge so you only need to replace the exhausted cartridge.
Cartridge life was quite good in black (480 pages at 5 percent coverage) and reasonable in colour (293 pages at 15 percent coverage). This breaks down to around 6 cents per black page and 28 cents per colour page. As previously mentioned, a more conservative estimate of the colour cost, given the individual cartridges, is 16 cents per page.
The ADF can hold up to 100 sheets up to A3 in size and feed stock up to 105gsm.
The 6500 is a good deal quicker than the last Canon A3 printer we tested (the 4650). With simple Word documents in black the 6500 peaked at 4.2ppm, almost twice as quick as the 4650. Average throughput was 0.95ppm, which is average for its class and the fastest of all the Canon printers tested. Character formation was pretty good, on par with the HP 970Cxi. We did note however, that on plain paper the black fill was not as dark as many of the other vendors' printers, notably the Lexmark. This improved dramatically on the high quality inkjet paper used for the photo test output, but then so did all the other vendors' products.
Photo output was very good with great colour fidelity at default driver settings, this appears to be a trademark of the current Canon range. Detail was very good and the dither pattern only became intrusive under very close scrutiny. A4 photo output from the 6500, and many of the other vendors' products for that matter, could happily sit framed on the mantlepiece and fool 99 percent of observers that it was a true photo.
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Thats really good printer,These would be useful in the work place who are using printers.Like in the office. This may be a big help to make their work easier. Thanks for sharing this information. Have a good to all of you.
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